Quotes About Idealism

Each administration that he'd served had started out with its own unique style, its own vision, energy, optimism, and idealism. But within a year, the entrenched bureaucracy reexerted its suffocating influence, and about a year after that, the new administration began getting pessimistic, isolated, and divided with internal conflicts and squabbles.

You know what an idealist is? That's a man who notices that a rose smells better than a cabbage, so he thinks the rose will make a better soup.

The hippy movement was a failure.

A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.

Among my generation, there was a purist position that any contact with electoral politics was an unforgiveable compromise.

I was naive enough to think that I could make the difference.

Too often people view idealists as naive.

When we overthrew Mubarak, we did this in 18 days. And because we were very naive and very unexperienced in revolutions, we thought that that was it. It is very difficult to imagine that you can actually get rid of a dictatorship that has been there for 60 years only in 18 days. So we were very naive.

There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.

For a while there I wasn't sure that anybody cared about being the best at anything, and it's nice to have a group of guys that feel like we're doing it for the cause. Maybe we're just really young and naive for thinking music can matter, but it does to us.

People like to use the word 'naivete' as a negative, but not for me.

But it is well to remember that we are dealing with nations every one of which has a direct individual interest to serve, and there is grave danger in an unshared idealism.

She is sensitive. She does not see the world as it is. She's a bit up in the clouds. She cannot fit in.

Give me smart, young, and angry and I'll move the world.

T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

Hero­ism breaks its heart, and ide­al­ism its back, on the intran­si­gence of the cred­u­lous and the mediocre, manip­u­lated by the cyn­i­cal and the corrupt.

Fond of bewailing the decadence of the modern world, of denouncing the younger generation for its lack of idealism and public spirit, he is blind to the fact of his own enormous selfishness. He is one of those invalids who make use of their real or imagined sufferings to get their own way.

Scratch a cynic and you will find a disappointed romantic.

Change the world? Of course they could. He really believed this, and he really believed that "a small group of committed individuals" could do it. He liked to say of PIH, "People think we're unrealistic. They don't know we're crazy.

What is it that the child has to teach? The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not. And the child is right.

The Prime Directive is a nice ideal, but have you noticed it never works in practice?

Great moments do not last in a confused and helter-skelter world. The idealist dreams how things ought to go, but they don't—there being no perfect human creatures or groups of them.

But once, when she was singing his praises, her mother interrupted 'No, no, I've seen too many young people like that - both when I was a student in Petersburg and when I was in exile in Siberia. They just don't know how to reconcile love of humanity and love for an actual person.

Les amis de l'abc... a group which barely missed becoming historic